ID: brilbear
Occupation: Director of cocoa beans
Deployment: The Great Chocolate Factory
Appearance: suspiciously reminiscent
Distinguishing features: particularly noticeable in the winter in a forest in the jacket turned inside out "Alaska"

An anonymous insider wrote a novel in short stories and essays "Gameriada" without even knowing that it has read.

Anatomy Atstoya, or why all of our games - rubbish? Part of 1.0006.

Whatever the toxic soup recipe or come up with the developers for their favorite players, it still must somehow try to cook, spending not only the forces and means, but also a fair amount of skill. Do you think so easy to make crooked, oblique, and bitter? For your information - very easy! We must train fiercely to prevent a beautiful, smooth and sweet; constantly distract themselves and their colleagues from work, so that by concentrating - they are forbid - have not found missing from the code point-to-point or oblique texture mapping. Need to spend a lot of energy to every moment forget coming to mind the original ideas and skillfully constructed dialogue. Truly production atstoya am the art, and with their leaders and recognized masters - not because some of his consignment and successfully sell year after year.

Acts:

"We had 6 months to make a playable demo version of the project and write a design document. The plan was executed exactly in half: design document, we have written (he, incidentally, is exactly 200 pages), but with the demo version was released hitch: it was not.

"We did not think about any marketing research on vision-document or that it would be good to start by understanding what is the" charm "of our project. We just wrote the concept and the welling in his fichey for You.

At the outbreak of memories of one of the developers is on the second stay, in order to understand how such a slippery place, these ill-fated "features" are buried even quite well-off projects.

Probably not worth spending time to explain that the mere mechanical increase in the special chip games stupidly dilutes the budget and force the studio, with each and every particular attention to the small piece of game designers and artists. Yes, and programmers from the abundance of diverse features of the project will only increase the likelihood of a stable drop applications and incompatible with one another.

The problem often lies elsewhere. Focusing on the individual, attention-grabbing features may distract igrodelov from work on the gameplay itself. Well, players who have loved a chip and watching her, after some time, either get used to it (and already perceive itself as a matter of course), or that only aggravates the situation, begin to be irritated by it. Even the notorious Crysis, fascinated by the incredible graphics and supernavorochennym costume for the hero, was on the side of the players for a heavy share of gaming hardware and unprincipled gameplay due to the first, and impudent cheating in the middle of a fight because of the second. "Even at an early stage, decided unanimously to throw out a system of unarmed combat, since the task was the most trivial of existing. But apart rukopashki front of us hanging problem, just delete that did not seem possible. Artificial Intelligence.

"If, say, needs to be done by the target date by the publisher of five characters, camera, two locations and the initial base AI (intelligence) - that we will dodge the ears, but put a checkmark in the points we needed. Never mind that the characters - are the same, the camera works through one place, look at the three locations with less, but everything that can AI - is pressing the trigger and turn on the spot, watching the players. "

"Several times the project is fully reconstructed. Chaotic is affected everything: art solution, gameplay, technology ".

This frank igrodela me personally for a moment struck a chord. As stated repeatedly ever seen such a disgrace. Not just thinking about what will happen in the end with the release - do-do do-do, and finally solved ... change everything. Of course, modifications, usually entails the search for new ideas and the acquisition of original solutions. But - who would have dreamed - of times in the time to remake all at once does not work. So with the release we are seeing in bewilderment or outdated due to continuous product development schedule, or features that have long since learned to use other, and a new project, they do not surprise anyone, focusing only on the players' faults. Yes, even the process of working on the game for so long can happen, that the numerous and disparate commitments developed from year to year, announcing something new and unheard of again, so to confuse the minds of the players that then nobody really remembers what one would expect. I just remember all the promises. Including unfulfilled, that creates unprintable torrent forums and in comments.

"At some point we realized that stealth-shooter we are not too tough. Not mature enough yet. It was therefore decided to remake the game in the classic shooter, but the emphasis put on the abundance of arcade moments, special effects, explosions and other spectacular things inherent in modern cinema.

"It was clear that at such times to make a decent game from scratch is absolutely unreal. Moreover, in time to make from scratch even a full trash is practically impossible. On the other hand, four months - enough time to make the trash on the basis of developments already available.

"But there was something that prevented us from safely do and promote the project: problems with programming. Because of them we could not show anything except the old screenshots: no commercials, no demos. No-thing. Delivery of Milestone year turned into something terrible. "

"The landscape was written by the editor, which was then safely thrown in the basket - to use it was extremely uncomfortable.

"The next step was cutting the game concept. As you might guess, the knife fell fighting game system, as well as forces to bring it to mind was not. Project is in progress "will soon be ready" involves a state of "chronic Abraham, when many things are written not as it should, but" so that somehow worked. Therefore, to understand that, at what stage is the fighting game, it was very problematic. "

"We are chronically short of people, so all levels were made by me. At that time it was not until the formalities, but because the current problem is often not caught by specialists, but to those who were free the rest. "

That was a nice recognition (we talked about such a month ago) me a lot of years have seen similar in several studios on several projects. "1) WII from the publisher for some reason began to engage the person who arranged for the post writer.

2) List Fitch was invented producer. As a result, the list received a very large and unsupportable.

3) Design document was written exactly one person, not familiar with the specifics of game development. Without the consent of anyone.

4) Most of the "reckless" Fitch has already fallen into the various announcements in the press. "

"The combat system has been changed several times. This amount of change was due to several factors. The game was conceived as a point & click RPG, "because causally. After management decided to change to a more hardcore.

"It took me a whole 2 months to realize how bad the situation, I only just barely justify that because of these 2 months, 2 weeks I was on vacation in a warm place."

"None of the team even close then not understand what we specifically want to do."

So:

4) Another of our troubles Aztec (brave producers atstoya) is that normal money to work on our greedy game publishers ever reason do not give. I repeat: normal, decent, to hire a project worthy of the normal number of specialists. And so the work went on as usual, many specialists, working on the project, often, well, just very often, have to be distracted from their tasks and are quick to do what nobody else can. But worse has happened. There is a great team of programmers (and is not an insult), which once tried to make a "killer» Need for Speed Lada Racing Club. Artists they have not been at all, game designers even more. But they made their game. Games as the press made them.

Picture:

"Those who came to our booth at the GDC, the hair stood on end. In general, thank God, found a publisher, or rather the head of the playing lines, which saved us from further umozabluzhdeniya, although he did not know about it. "

"It was decided temporarily to do everything ourselves, and to show zadumok future call quite good artist. As a result, virtually all the textures in pleydemo were taken from the Internet, the exception was the texture of characters that were drawn by hand. So:

5) Another thorn in the ass body Developer - mindless devout progress, infinite growth capacity and the number of cores. But more unusual cheaper RAM. To the player did not feel the futility of buying an expensive computer, it constantly needs to feed an incredibly complex and demanding on the resources of the product. After reaching the screens of the notorious and referred to Crysis, its image a little too quickly became a benchmark of what should be placed before the eyes of the consumer games. However, the trick was that of the $ 22 million development cost of this masterpiece was the lion's share of premium NVIDIA, desk, responsible for the race kompovyh weapons. So now all that our developers are doing, initially at its "image" becomes atstoy. Although, believe me, nobody did anything to deform their offspring. Just like that goes.

Result:

"1) The universe game was reduced to one big city.
2) The number of races was reduced to three, and play was possible only for two.
3) The number of monsters was reduced to 15.
4) The number of skills dropped to 50.
5) The number of types of equipment and weapons dropped to 90.
6) Number of spells reduced to 30, and prayers have been dropped altogether.
7) Scenario game has evolved from a nonlinear to the linear. "In testing a variety of reasons very little time left - for the last week before sending the game into gold it was necessary to do two things:

1) Fix all the bugs that may impede the passage of the game.
2) Minimize the number of all the other bugs.

"Among other nevylovlennyh bugs can be identified except that falling off the heads of the opponents.

"After four years of development, three renewals, change of publisher, three dubbing voice: three complete changes of the plot, two alterations videos and multiple enhancements technological base, the game was finally released." So:

Reasons for domestic atstoyu was enough. Although most of them have not quite fair to attribute only to our native Aztecs. Enough and completely international. However, it is understood, nothing is eternal under the moon. The flow of bad games will gradually dry up. On the one hand the entire video game industry crippled the world economic crisis, especially local. On the other - the players themselves have already begun to understand what's what. The boom of information technology has resulted not only that the news about bad products immediately reverberated in all the nooks network, but even the fact that professional (and not so) reviews many games began to appear not only after the release of the add, but in time, and even before. And this is quite a evolutionary factors.